Director Lucia Puenzo on Telling a Story That No One Wants to Tell 'The German Doctor'

Argentinian film director Lucia Puenzo made waves with her first feature film XXY, which told the story of an intersex teen struggling with discrimination and violence in a small village in Uruguay, winning the Critics' Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. In her new film, The German Doctor, out now, the setting is 1960s Bariloche, Argentina, a small city that drew controversy in the 1990s when it was discovered to be a secret haven for Nazi war criminals. One such criminal was the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, known for his cruel "scientific" human experiments at Auschwitz.

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The film takes the six months when history lost track of Mengele's whereabouts in Argentina and imagines this story—he becomes friends with a family in Bariloche, earning their trust to the extent that they allow him to experiment on their daughter Lilith, who suffers from a genetic disease that stops her from growing. Here, we talk with Puenzo about the connection between our culture of beauty standards and the Nazi project of racial "purity," the resistance she met in making the film, and what it's like to become an accidental advocate:

In both The German Doctor and your last film XXY you tell a story of a child born with a genetic difference. Can you talk about what draws you to these stories of the body?

I hadn't realized how close The German Doctor and XXY were until I finished writing. Of course, the moment I finished it I saw the connection and how Josef Mengele can be seen as the fanatic expression of the plastic surgeon in XXY. Now I see all this. But I would have to invent a theory to say why I keep going back to genetics. More than an interest in history and the war aspect of Nazism, I can say that in both the film and the book it's based on, I was more concerned and intrigued by the medical aspect of Nazism—the crazy idea they had that they could modulate a whole race. I think that is a very omnipotent idea that has gone on to have contact with many ethical dilemmas of modern medicine; the line keeps getting pushed to have perfect bodies and to bring everybody to kind of standard measurements.

Do you see a connection between the Nazi "super race" project and the present-day culture of beauty standards?

One of the first people that I interviewed for the film was not a historian but a doctor—a very well-known endocrinologist in Argentina. He relayed to me a very provocative idea that I think has something to do with your question. He told me that the growth hormone therapy that [Lionel] Messi, the most well-known football player of Argentina and maybe the world, did when he was a kid was actually done with the same growth hormones that Mengele was experimenting with in the concentration camps. Of course, this is a really dynamic provocative idea—that today's growth therapies have in the heart of them this Nazi idea that all the bodies should look alike, be the same. One could say with Messi, "Well, but he became the best player in the world," but who knows if that was the body he was supposed to have. It's so delicate trying to understand the limits of what is good in medicine and what is crossing the line.

The German Doctor takes place in Bariloche, which was for years a haven for Nazi war criminals. Can you talk a little about your relationship to that history?

Growing up, I was always very intrigued by the hundreds of Nazis that were accepted and in operation after the war, not only in Argentina, but across the continent. We learn about it in school, it is not a secret, and it is curious that so few films and novels have been done on the subject. When I first began to write the novel, it was more invention than investigation, trying to figure out what the story was, who the narrator would be and so on. Then I began to contact many historians, one of who, Carlos Echeverria, was a huge help to the book and the film. He made a documentary called Pact of Silence that led to the extradition of [war criminal] Erich Priebke, and he also went to the German School of Bariloche in the '60s when Priebke was director; his firsthand experience ended up playing a big part in the film. Also, he is very influential in the city of Bariloche, which is the way we got in touch with the right people to do the film. The city has a big German community and so there was a lot of resistance to us shooting there.

How did that resistance play out?

For example, we would have a location, but when we arrived, somebody had made a call and we didn't have that location anymore. That happened a lot. Whoever was in charge had of course read the novel and knew we were mentioning the German School and that it actually existed before the war, and were very bothered by the idea. Another example was with the hotel that we shot the film in, which is also where we lived. We thought because it was closed for the holidays it would be a great proposition to rent that hotel. But in the beginning we were met with a lot of resistance. And then we found out that this hotel has a lot of German money in its origin—was made with German money. The whole time we were making the film we were confronted with facts of history, which made it very difficult to make.

XXY feels like a queer film that speaks for a marginalized voice, and The German Doctor also tells a story that, as you say, has been underrepresented in literature and film. Are your films advocacy projects?

My way of working is to not be very conscious of the subject, the audience—or to give political voice to anyone. It would be horribly terrifying to think about things like that at the beginning—that's a paralyzing way to start a story. When I have taught screenwriting classes I tell students to be very selfish and tell the story they want to tell—to not think about the outside world until you have a second or third draft. It can actually be the worst thing if you think too much about what the message is.